WHEN INTERNATIONAL Women’s Day was first celebrated on this day 100 years ago, a million women joined rallies across Europe for the right to work, to vote, to be trained, to hold public office and to end discrimination. Testimony today to the efforts of generations of women’s campaigners, those rights to work and train – 60 per cent of Irish women are in the paid workforce – and to vote and hold public office have been substantially achieved, although inequality and prejudice endure. And violence remains a feature of all too many women’s lives. The struggle goes on. Attitudes die hard. Institutions are slow to change.
The new programme for government includes a number of references to women’s rights, some general and aspirational, others more specific and welcome. A Fine Gael-Labour coalition appointed the first minister of state for equality and hopefully will do so again. “Equality is at the heart of what it means to be a citizen in our democracy,” the programme declares somewhat piously, promising to ensure “that the rights of women and men to equality of treatment and to participate fully in society are upheld”.
It promises that State boards will include at least 40 per cent representation of each gender and, in a half-hearted step towards gender-mainstreaming, to require public bodies “to take due note of equality and human rights in carrying out their functions”.
The programme promises to consolidate and reform legislation on domestic violence and family law. In health policy there are pledges to introduce a cervical cancer vaccination catch-up programme for all girls in secondary school, to extend Breastcheck to women aged 65-69 years, to compensate those excluded on age grounds from the Lourdes Hospital Redress Scheme, and to ban female genital mutilation.
There is a welcome commitment, backed by the National Women’s Council, to removing the antiquated constitutional reference to women’s place in the home – “by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved” – and to encouraging greater participation in politics. There was no change in women’s representation in the election: some 23 women TDs have again been returned, none under 30, and only three under 40. Of 566 candidates, only 86 were women. The programme rightly eschews the idea of quotas for women candidates in favour of linking party subsidies to the number of women candidates they put up.